Willie Leroy Jones distinguished himself as he was about to be executed this week, displaying what a prosecutor once described as his cocky personality and returning the focus of the death penalty debate to Virginia.
In the last two weeks of his life, Jones -- who admitted killing an elderly couple for their life savings -- was determined to 'keep on smiling' as he walked to the electric chair Tuesday night.
'I'm in control here,' Jones, 34, said as his final days ticked off at Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt. 'This is my death.'
He succeeded in bringing a distinctive style to his execution. He entered the execution chamber with what witnesses described as a swagger, hitching up his pants as he crossed the room, surrounded by guards. And he smiled slightly.
Standing beside the state's 84-year-old oak electric chair, he leaned over and kissed the armrest.
After being strapped in, prison chaplain Russ Ford read a lengthy statement criticizing capital punishment. Jones leveled a stare at the 20 people watching from the glass-enclosed witness area, and said in a lilting voice, 'I love you.'
Guards fitted the metal cap to his head and the leather mask to his face. With the first 90-second surge of 1,825 volts of electricity, his body jerked slightly and his fists clenched, while smoke and sparks rose from an electrode attached to his right leg.
Jones was the 16th Virginia inmate to be put to death since the state resumed executions in 1982.
His death comes at a time when national attention has been focused on executions in Virginia, peaking in May when Roger Keith Coleman professed his innocence via telephone to television talk shows and appeared on the cover of Time magazine.
The steady rate of executions -- Jones was the eighth since early 1990 -- has prompted death penalty foes to rank Virginia as one of the country's top four 'killing states,' behind Texas, Florida and Louisiana.
Forty-eight men are on Virginia's death row, and many are nearing the end of their appeals.
Charles Stamper, 39, convicted of killing three restaurant workers in a Richmond suburb and who has lived on death row the longest, has an Oct. 28 execution date.
Timothy Bunch, 33, who shot a Prince William County woman in the head then hanged her from a doorknob with one of her scarves, is scheduled to die Dec. 10.
Virginia Department of Corrections officials said this week another execution could be scheduled this fall, and several other inmates may exhaust their appeals by early next year.
Jones admitted killing Graham and Myra Adkins, the parents of a friend. Wearing a disguise, he went to their rural Charles City County home in 1983, knowing they kept large amounts of money in cigar boxes and a small safe.
He shot Graham Adkins, 77, in the head, killing him. He bound and gagged Myra Adkins and stuffed her in a closet. After she looked him in the eye and said, 'Willie, I know it's you,' he put the gun to her temple and shot her.
Jones poured gasoline through the house and set it on fire. Myra Adkins was still alive; the state medical examiner ruled she died of smoke inhalation.
Police captured Jones a week later in Hawaii, where he had served in the Army for five years. He had spent all but about $10,000 of the $35, 000 he took from the couple, using it to buy clothing, expensive hotel rooms and a used sports car.
'I felt nothing, nothing,' he said eight years later about the crimes. 'It was as if I was watching somebody else do those things. And the cliche is, it didn't hit me until I got to the Oahu city jail and I heard all the inmates yelling and I thought, 'I'm not supposed to be here. This isn't me.''
Jones was popular with the other inmates on death row at the Mecklenburg Correctional Center in Boydton and said he felt a responsibility to the men he left behind.
He had always shunned the media, refusing to talk either about his crimes or of his participation in 1984 with five other inmates in the largest death row escape in U.S. history.
But at the end he gave interviews to several newspapers and television staions. 'It is important to let people know,' he said, 'that there's a bunch of human beings back there on death row.'
He repeatedly said he was determined 'not to lose it' and cry, but Jones admitted he shed tears when he heard in a letter from another chaplain that the other inmates had stood in their windows and waved at the departing van the day he was transferred from Mecklenburg.
The final 48 hours he was on the phone virtually nonstop, talking to old friends and relatives -- many he had not seen in a decade or more.
'I hate it when people cry about me,' Jones said. 'They don't have to do that. Because the thing is, I'm okay. I'm really going to be okay. '
